Testing a Votecounter (prev. Any Mods Willing to Volunteer?)

Thesp · Post Post #0 (isolation #0) » Fri Feb 28, 2014 7:29 am

Are there any mods out there who are willing to help me test out an automatic vote-counter I've been working on? There will be cake. If so, all I need you to do is this:

1) On the first page of the game (preferably in the first post), you must include an area tag with the title as "Living Players". Inside this area tag, on a separate line for each, is a list of every living player in the game. If a player has been replaced, the current player

must

be listed first, then afterwards preceded by " (replaces playername)". If replacing multiple people, each must be listed within the parentheses like so: " (replaces playername; playername2; playername3)".
2) In the same post, you must include an area tag with the title, "Links". Inside this area tag, you can have links to different parts of the game, but the last link

must

be a link to the first post of the most recent Day, and be written like so: "Day X - Post 273". (Actually, all I

really

care about is that there is at least one link in the area, and that the last "word" of the last link in the area is the post number for the most recent Day.)
3) Let me know that your game conforms to these standards.

Here's an example of what you would need on the first page:

Code: Select all

[area=Living Players]
Bob
Carol (replaces Joe)
Sue (replaces Tom; Lisa)
Julio
[/area]

[area=Links]
[post=#3329643]Day 1[/post]
[post=#3329643]Night 1[/post]
[post=#3329643]Day 2: Post #532[/post]
[/area]

...and how that code looks:

Living PlayersBob
Carol (replaces Joe)
Sue (replaces Tom; Lisa)
Julio

LinksDay 1: Post #2
Night 1: Post #531
Day 2: Post #532

I might do this super-fast and have a beta version done by next week, or it might take me significantly longer and it takes a few months. No telling. It depends on how much time I can carve out for this project. Likewise, I won't be able to even show you the results of the vote counter for a while, possibly even until after your game is done. Sorry. However, it will help me get things ironed out, and if we're lucky and I can get it working right, we can have a utility to make votecounts easier for mods until we get some kind of official one built into the forums. Thanks!

Thesp · Post Post #2 (isolation #1) » Fri Feb 28, 2014 12:10 pm

In post 1, xRECKONERx wrote:I have a mininormal hitting queue soon, I'll use it there

Thanks! The more, the merrier - I'll take as many people as will volunteer.

Thesp · Post Post #4 (isolation #2) » Sat Mar 01, 2014 9:29 am

Feel free to put the information in your start post now if you like - the vote counter won't auto-post in your game. Instead, it will be a website where you'll enter a link to your game, and it will give you a BBCode pre-formatted votecount you can copy and paste into the game. It will also alert you to any votes it's not sure it interpreted right. I'll let you know when I've got the site up and running, but in the meanwhile, feel free to add the above info to your game if you like.

Thesp · Post Post #8 (isolation #3) » Mon Mar 03, 2014 5:17 am

In post 6, callforjudgement wrote:
In post 4, Thesp wrote:Feel free to put the information in your start post now if you like - the vote counter won't auto-post in your game. Instead, it will be a website where you'll enter a link to your game, and it will give you a BBCode pre-formatted votecount you can copy and paste into the game. It will also alert you to any votes it's not sure it interpreted right. I'll let you know when I've got the site up and running, but in the meanwhile, feel free to add the above info to your game if you like.
As someone who's written a similar tool myself, how are you handling the following common issues?:

Replacements

Players abbreviating/misspelling votes

Unusual formatting for votes or unvotes
There are some other issues that mods care about, such as doublevoters and the like, but those don't come up as often.

Good questions!
1) Replacements are handled by putting the replaced player entirely in the shoes of the replacement player. That is, it finds the most current player for the slot (based on the properly formatted opening post), and for all times it would find the replaced player's name (as author or as person being voted), it replaces it with the replacement player. (I'm programming in Python, so I use a dictionary for the replaced players as keys, and the replacement players as values for those keys.)
2) I use Python's difflib for finding the closest match to the player's name. If it finds a match within a particular tolerance, great! If it doesn't meet a certain tolerance, it will warn the user about that vote, and provide a link to the post in question for the user to verify the correct votee. It does not like abbreviations at all and often misses the correct votee, but it definitely throws a warning on those for verification.
3) It loves seeing official votes. It handles any form of "vote:" that uses a colon, whether or not it is bolded. If a user uses the word vote without a colon, it will entirely miss it. This is somewhat by design - there are too many cases where people will use the word "vote", whether bolded or not, outside the context of trying to vote someone. However, if a mod wants to use the program, they may have to beat it into a few user's heads to use some proper formatting. If this becomes a widespread tool, I imagine the need to remind players to use proper formatting will be lessened.

It's not equipped to handle any unusual voting mechanisms Things like double-voters will have to be manually adjusted after the fact by the user.

Thesp · Post Post #10 (isolation #4) » Mon Mar 03, 2014 10:02 am

In post 9, xtopherusD wrote:Ooh, interesting!

What happens when a player quotes a post that another voted in? How will it know to not attribute the second instance of that "vote:" to the second person?

It truncates out all quoted text before processing a post to look for votes.

Thesp · Post Post #13 (isolation #5) » Tue Mar 04, 2014 5:24 am

In post 12, saulres wrote:
In post 11, callforjudgement wrote:what happens if someone votes in spoiler tags?
Why would someone do that? And do mods really count that?

I don't

think

that mine would pick up a vote in a spoiler tag, but like saulres, I don't think that's a significant issue. If anything, votes in spoiler tags should be strongly, strongly discouraged (if even ever counted at all).

Thesp · Post Post #21 (isolation #6) » Wed Mar 05, 2014 7:06 am

I have a site up and running now. If you want to try it, PM me with a link to your game that meets the formatting standards in the first post.

By the way, you

can

include the initial information in spoiler tags, so it doesn't take up valuable real estate in your opening post if you like. So, something like:

Code: Select all

[spoiler=Votecounter Settings]
[area=Living Players]
Bob
Carol (replaces Joe)
Sue (replaces Tom; Lisa)
Julio
[/area]

[area=Links]
[post=#3329643]Day 1[/post]
[post=#3329643]Night 1[/post]
[post=#3329643]Day 2: Post #532[/post]
[/area]
[/spoiler]

...will look just like this...

Spoiler: Votecounter Settings

Thesp · Post Post #23 (isolation #7) » Mon Mar 17, 2014 3:13 am

In post 22, xRECKONERx wrote:Suggestion: allow for a way to use manual nicknames for players? For example, a lot of longer names get abbreviated (DrippingGoofball -> DGB) and it's kind of a pain to ask players to just use the full name every time.

Interestingly, you can actually do this manually by listing "DGB" as a replacement. You may also want to list "dgb" as a replacement if you have players too lazy to use the shift key. So, something like...

Code: Select all

DrippingGoofball (replaces DGB; dgb)

...in the Living Players tag will cause the votecounter to add "DGB" and "dgb" to the name list, and will always substitute "DrippingGoofball" for that name.

I may add some code in the future to make that more explicit (perhaps allowing you to write "(alias DGB; dgb)"?), but it will be after more testing before I update, unless something is seriously broken.

Thesp · Post Post #25 (isolation #8) » Mon Mar 17, 2014 4:09 am

In post 22, xRECKONERx wrote:Suggestion: allow for a way to use manual nicknames for players? For example, a lot of longer names get abbreviated (DrippingGoofball -> DGB) and it's kind of a pain to ask players to just use the full name every time.

I see the issue popping up: when people vote "CDB", it's more likely to think that's "CooLDoG" than "ChannelDelibird", probably because the letter "D" is closer to the beginning of the word in CooLDoG's name than it is in ChannelDelibird's. In any case, the "replaces" trick above should handle it easily.

T-Bone wrote:This looks really cool. Great work.

Thanks!

Thesp · Post Post #34 (isolation #9) » Mon May 05, 2014 3:25 am

I'll fix it to have it ignore code tags sometime in the next week, along with another minor tweak in processing setup tags. And thanks for the kind words! I hope it becomes a standard tool that moderators enjoy using to make their lives easier.

Thesp · Post Post #36 (isolation #10) » Thu Jun 12, 2014 3:26 am

I'm not sure I understand what you're seeing. What game are you using this on? I can check out the code in your opening post and see if there's any typos, or help you draft the settings if you haven't done so.

Thesp · Post Post #37 (isolation #11) » Thu Jun 12, 2014 4:48 am

Figured out the issue over PM. The votecounter is working beautifully. If you want to add it to

your

game (yes, I'm talking to you!), I'm happy to help you set it up and make your modding job easier!

Thesp · Post Post #39 (isolation #12) » Fri Jun 13, 2014 8:10 am

In post 38, xRECKONERx wrote:Does the VC check to see if there's been a hammer already? IE, I come and run a VC on a thread where someone hammered then someone else unvoted later

It is designed to do so, yes. It will actually give you the

current

vote, but it throws up a warning that it thinks there was a hammer vote at Post XXX.

Thesp · Post Post #40 (isolation #13) » Fri Jun 13, 2014 8:11 am

Also, in getting Zachrulezz set up for his game, he asked me about No Lynch votes, which I shamefully neglected to incorporate in my votecounter. I will put that in at some point, hopefully this Sunday (but I'm not sure exactly when).

Thesp · Post Post #43 (isolation #14) » Fri Jun 13, 2014 9:14 am

PM sent.

Thesp · Post Post #44 (isolation #15) » Mon Aug 11, 2014 6:01 am

I've done an update to the votecounter! It now:

1. Processes No Lynch votes.

It

should

do this smoothly, but I've not been able to test it thoroughly as I'd like. Please let me know if a No Lynch vote pops up in a game you're running with the votecounter, and how the votecounter handles it.

2. Properly warns on a lynching vote.

Previously, it logged when a potentially lynching vote had been placed, but I neglected to

actually display that information to the user

. This has now been corrected.

3. Optional Deadlines.

If you include a Deadline area tag in your settings, it will spit out deadline information with the votecount. The string inside the Deadline area tag should be the same one you would put in the countdown tag. Here is an example:

Deadline2014-08-17 14:00:00 -5.00

Let me know if you have any questions or need anything further. Here's a link to the votecounter site, again:

http://www.robandkriskris.com/votecounter/

Thanks!

Thesp · Post Post #49 (isolation #16) » Mon Aug 11, 2014 7:39 am

In post 46, Bicephalous Bob wrote:
In post 41, xRECKONERx wrote:Hmm, okay, that's good to know.

Also, as a note... I'm currently using it in a game. It processed this as a vote for the player '4nxi3ty':

unvote
vote: zzzx

When I edited zzzx to be ZZZX, it processed it correctly for that player.

This is easily fixed by putting both the vote string and the possible matches in lowercase.

Also, I volunteer.

I've pondered the utility of this, and I really need to do some benchmarking, because it's already a bit slow (in part because I'm on shared webhosting). Parsing a 21 page game for votes takes about ~13 seconds of computation time. I've wondered if it's worth adding the additional overhead of lowercasing every votee, and running the final responses through another dictionary to match the lowercased player names to the correctly cased counterparts. (I also had illusions that players would generally be better about correct casing and by preserving casing, I'd more likely pick up abbreviations like "STD" for "Save the Dragons" better, which has shown some degree of success. I may be wrong in that regard, though.)

I'm not sure if my concerns about performance and the utility of preserving case are warranted or not, though.

And I'm glad people are enjoying the votecounter! Now that I've gotten to use it in a game I'm modding, I've found it has saved me immeasurable amounts of work and has made it trivially easy to post a votecount on every page.

Thesp · Post Post #51 (isolation #17) » Mon Aug 11, 2014 7:57 am

In post 50, Why not wrote:maybe you could have the votecounter just build off from the last vote count or from the last post the last votecount considered?

that would make 23-page processing unnecessary

I've pondered this. I'm hesitant to do it from the last votecount, because mods often want to customize their votecounts (which would make pre-processing obscenely harder, if not impossible). Most likely I'd save it to a database so it could work from there (or just cache it), and allow an option you could check for it to bust the database/cache and start from the beginning of the day if you had edited posts for votes or anything like that. Maybe in a future release.

(And also likely to happen if this starts getting significantly more adoption, which hopefully it will.)

Thesp · Post Post #64 (isolation #18) » Mon Aug 11, 2014 3:43 pm

In post 62, Kagami wrote:Because even if you read every post, it's inconvenient to keep a separate vote-tallying document and error-prone to do otherwise.

It also ensures that the quality of the vote counting doesn't decline during periods of extremely high player activity, or low mod availability.

This.

Also, I can post an accurate, perfectly formatted votecount

from my phone

in under a minute. Why

wouldn't

I want that available to me in an easy-to-use form?

Thesp · Post Post #67 (isolation #19) » Tue Aug 12, 2014 8:00 am

In post 52, xRECKONERx wrote:I wish you could customize the output somehow but I know that's not possible without account or phpbb integration

If this becomes widely adopted, it would be fairly easy for me to incoorprate a few common styles as drop-down selections on the first page.

Thesp · Post Post #69 (isolation #20) » Tue Aug 19, 2014 5:09 am

In post 68, jasonT1981 wrote:Anyway, my question. While it has not popped up yet. How do you handle the coding multiple replacements in the same slot?

I'm glad you're enjoying it! To handle multiple replacements, simply separate the replaced players' names with a semicolon and a space. For example, if Sue replaced Tom who replaced Lisa, that player line would look like this:

Code: Select all

Sue (replaces Tom; Lisa)

I hope this helps!

Thesp · Post Post #74 (isolation #21) » Sat Sep 06, 2014 1:37 am

In post 73, saulres wrote:Oh hey, thanks. I went to the OP for information and didn't reread the thread. Good deal.

I'm just confirming that tn5421 is correct - the setting can be spoilered (and often are). I need to re-do the opening post sometime soon.

Thesp · Post Post #77 (isolation #22) » Wed Oct 01, 2014 2:04 pm

In post 76, N wrote:Is it possible for this to automatically include the deadline? Like, if the mod puts the deadline in the op or something, could it just copy from there?

It is! I need to update the opening post to reflect this. See below, and let me know if you have any questions.

In post 44, Thesp wrote:I've done an update to the votecounter! It now:

1. Processes No Lynch votes.

It
should
do this smoothly, but I've not been able to test it thoroughly as I'd like. Please let me know if a No Lynch vote pops up in a game you're running with the votecounter, and how the votecounter handles it.

2. Properly warns on a lynching vote.

Previously, it logged when a potentially lynching vote had been placed, but I neglected to
actually display that information to the user
. This has now been corrected.

3. Optional Deadlines.

If you include a Deadline area tag in your settings, it will spit out deadline information with the votecount. The string inside the Deadline area tag should be the same one you would put in the countdown tag. Here is an example:

Deadline2014-08-17 14:00:00 -5.00

Let me know if you have any questions or need anything further. Here's a link to the votecounter site, again:

http://www.robandkriskris.com/votecounter/

Thanks!

Thesp · Post Post #78 (isolation #23) » Mon Oct 06, 2014 4:09 am

FYI - the site is down due to a server upgrade over the weekend, and I'm working on getting things reconfigured properly. I'm going to try and complete the fix by this evening because work is busy and I feel like crap right now, so if it's down now please know it's going to be back up in a while. Thanks!

Thesp · Post Post #80 (isolation #24) » Tue Oct 07, 2014 11:30 am

I swear I've been working on this, it's just been a bit of a nightmare.

If you have any experience with shared webhosting services, and feel like you have some knowledge you could contribute, I've got a Stack Overflow question open on it.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2624 ... weakrefset

Hopefully we'll have this knocked out by tonight!

Thesp · Post Post #81 (isolation #25) » Wed Oct 08, 2014 3:33 am

We

should

be back up and running properly! Sorry for the downtime - hopefully there won't be another catastrophic security flaw found in Unix necessitating a server upgrade that breaks my site any time soon.

Please let me know if you encounter any problems. Thanks!

Thesp · Post Post #82 (isolation #26) » Tue Oct 14, 2014 10:24 am

Made a minor tweak to the votecounter. It should now disregard all spoiler text as well, and now adds an italicized "None" if there are no people not voting. Please let me know if you experience any problems. Thanks!

Thesp · Post Post #84 (isolation #27) » Mon Oct 20, 2014 3:25 am

Nope - I

think

it should all be covered, but I can't remember if the info on the deadline settings made it into the FAQ or not (check the linked post for further details).

And you can absolutely spoiler the votecounter settings themselves - the votecounter will ignore spoilered text in posts when checking for votes, but it will indeed check in spoilered boxes in the first 5 posts when looking for the settings information. Let me know if you have any trouble setting it up and I'm happy to help. Thanks!

Thesp · Post Post #89 (isolation #28) » Fri Nov 14, 2014 10:14 am

In post 86, xRECKONERx wrote:How hard would it be to add a prod check into this thing?

Like a field in the first post where you put in the prod limit (say, 72 hours) then have this check if anyone hasn't posted and add a prod for them at the bottom of the VC?

MS already has "activity overview" but I was just thinking it'd be a cool feature to have

Conceivable. I'll put it on the backburner for next update I do. It's a lower priority simply because of the existence of Activity Overview, but I could imagine the utility of having that handled all in one place.

Thesp · Post Post #92 (isolation #29) » Mon Feb 09, 2015 5:01 am

I ran into an interesting problem this weekend on a votecounter, so I wanted to share the issue with everyone, in case it should come up again.

In the heading post for a game, this line:

Code: Select all

16. Bookitty [size=10][strike]CrashTextDummie[/strike] [strike]Juls[/strike] [strike]farside22[/size][/strike]

...caused a problem for the HTML parser. See the "/size" tag inside the "strike" and "/strike" tags around farside22's name? It properly should be:

Code: Select all

16. Bookitty [size=10][strike]CrashTextDummie[/strike] [strike]Juls[/strike] [strike]farside22[/strike][/size]

...which keeps the strike tags self-contained, and a proper subset of the size tags. When it's switched around like in the first example, BBCode causes the HTML to be a bit malformed, and BeautifulSoup (the HTML parser that my program uses) can't process the post properly and truncates the rest of the post. Since the settings for the votecounter were below this point, it couldn't find the settings and refused to work.

I don't know of a good way of preventing this in the future - you may just have to watch how your tags match up. Let me know if you run into any other issues, and I'm happy to help make votecounts easy for you in your game!

Thesp · Post Post #97 (isolation #30) » Thu Sep 24, 2015 8:48 am

I just looked into this. Your settings look correct, so I can't imagine that's an issue. It also seems to be working on other games. I imagine it's timing out, as might happen if it tries to go over too many pages to count votes. A workaround might be to find the oldest vote, and trick the votecounter by telling it that Day 1 begins at that post, rather than from the first page. That would reduce its overhead in pulling pages from the site, and possibly avoid the timeout.

Thesp · Post Post #99 (isolation #31) » Thu Sep 24, 2015 10:50 am

In post 98, fferyllt wrote:I moved the setting of Day 1 start to post 618. I'm still getting the time-out message. The last successful vote count is in post 1757.

I also have a vote that isn't being picked up in post 1063. I can't figure out what's wrong with the vote or the settings for that one.

I don't know if the settings were changed or not, but I

think

I've figured out the solution. In the settings, there was a line that read like this:

Code: Select all

Aneninen (replaces aninem; Aneninen)

I took the liberty of editing it to read like this:

Code: Select all

Aneninen (replaces aninem)

...since the exact same spelling of "Aneninen" appears as both the original player and the replacement. It seems to work now. I don't know if that setting was changed between now and your last vote count, but that may have contributed to the breaking.

That said, I have no idea why it's missing Post 1063, and I'll look deeper into that, because it really should pick up vote tags easily. That's really weird.

Thesp · Post Post #101 (isolation #32) » Thu Sep 24, 2015 10:57 am

In post 98, fferyllt wrote:I also have a vote that isn't being picked up in post 1063. I can't figure out what's wrong with the vote or the settings for that one.

I figured it out. It's a malformed bbcode tag that causes the parser to drop part of the post. I'll PM you further details about it.

Thesp · Post Post #104 (isolation #33) » Mon Oct 05, 2015 4:27 am

In post 103, PokerFace wrote:General heads up your auto counter requires ':'

Vote: Thesp
will be counted

vote pokerface
will not be counted

This is absolutely correct. It's mentioned somewhere in the help section, but I need to re-work the front page sometime to make this abundantly clear. Votes must be bolded and use a colon or they will be missed. Vote tags are extra-special preferred.

Thesp · Post Post #106 (isolation #34) » Fri Oct 09, 2015 4:26 am

In post 105, callforjudgement wrote:When I wrote my vote counter, my rule for recognising a vote was "anything in bold that contains 'vote' as a substring". (Although that's because my counter is designed to let mods choose controversial situations manually, and counts a vote automatically only if it's totally unambiguous.)

True, but there are a number of cases where a larger section of text is bolded, and the word "vote" is included there. I find it much easier (and also significantly clearer in understanding on the user side when explained) to say that it must have a colon, like "vote:" and be bolded. Of course, at some point I would like us to universally use vote tags for voting rather than bolded text, as it will make data collection and analysis actually doable.